An Insider On the Apple Tablet — I never fully believed the Apple tablet was real beyond dreams, until I heard these words over my phone: “Hey, it's [redacted]. I may or may not have sat in some Apple meetings for the tablet.” — I was driving, and swerved a little bit, even though both hands were on the wheel.

Project Retweet: Phase One — Some of Twitter's best features are emergent—people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate. One such convention is retweeting. When you want to call more attention to a particular tweet, you copy/paste it as your own …

Zune HD packs a big processing punch — Microsoft's Zune HD will use one of the most powerful chips to go into a portable media player yet: Nvidia's multicore Tegra processor. — Tegra packs two processor cores based on intellectual property from U.K.-based chip designer ARM.

Microsoft: Next Mac Office due late 2010 with Outlook — Microsoft announced Thursday that the next edition of Microsoft Office for Mac will be released in late 2010. The new edition of the venerable office suite will include Outlook for Mac, a new application that will replace the Entourage.

Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books — Paper books may be low tech, but no one will tell you how and where you can read them. — For many people, the problem with electronic books is that they come loaded with just those kinds of restrictions. Digital books bought today from Amazon.com …

Palm Reportedly Cuts Pre Production Plans — The best days for the Palm (PALM) Pre may already have past. That was the implication of the Sell call on the stock this morning from Morgan Joseph - and the same theme can be found in a similarly bearish note this morning from Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar.

Windows 7 review — Oh, Windows. You inform and entertain us. You are inescapable, and your Start menu is full of items relevant to our productivity. You move us. Sort of. To be honest, we're not sure what sort of state this fair planet of ours would be in without …

Social Mobile Games Are Hot. $3 Million Hot — Seattle-based Z2Live, a new mobile social gaming platform, is announcing a second round of financing tomorrow - $3 million from Madrona Venture Group (also Seattle based), topping off the $1 million they raised from Madrona last year.

Apple, AT&T sued for lack of MMS capability — A class action started in a Louisana district court alleging that Apple and AT&T touted the iPhone as supporting MMS (multimedia messaging service) but have not as yet provided the service. — The plaintiffs allege that Apple …

Radiohead Says No More Albums — Radiohead said in a magazine interview that it wouldn't release any more full-length albums, instead focusing on downloadable singles like its recently released “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” and shorter EPs. — AFP/Getty Images — Radiohead's Thom Yorke at a July 2008 concert in Amsterdam.

Microsoft's Word Patent Woes May Be Broadly Shared — Few things must be more emotionally paradoxical for the anti-patentistas of the world than to see Microsoft get clobbered on a patent infringement action. Do you rejoice because one of the great advocates, and enforcers …

Twitter-based Botnet Command Channel — While digging around I found a botnet that uses Twitter as its command and control structure. Basically what it does is use the status messages to send out new links to contact, then these contain new commands or executables to download and run.